The Tracker Who Read the Forest Floor

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, a search-and-rescue volunteer named Dale Hutchins can identify a lost hiker by nothing more than their footprints. After thirty years of tracking, he reads the forest floor the way most people read a newspaper. He notices the depth of a heel strike that reveals a slight limp. He sees the spacing between steps that tells him whether someone is exhausted or panicked. He finds a scuffed rock and knows the person paused there, turned east, then changed their mind. "Most folks think they're invisible out here," Dale once told a reporter from the Asheville Citizen-Times. "But the ground remembers everything."

When the psalmist writes that the Almighty knows when we sit and when we rise, that He perceives our thoughts from afar and is familiar with all our ways, this is the kind of knowing he means — only infinitely deeper. God does not merely read our tracks after we have passed. He was there before the trail existed. He formed the feet that would walk it. He shaped every tendon and neuron in the hidden place, weaving us together with a knowledge so thorough that David can only stammer in wonder: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."

Dale Hutchins finds the lost by studying their traces. The Most High never loses us in the first place. Before we take a single step, He already knows the path — because He made both the walker and the road.